


Listen

by shinesurge



Category: Kidd Commander (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen, dnd's languages are cool af
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-15
Updated: 2018-08-15
Packaged: 2019-06-27 22:32:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15694674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinesurge/pseuds/shinesurge
Summary: Kidd Commander with a slightly different language system.





	Listen

**Author's Note:**

> I've always really _really_ liked the way DND handles its languages, like the idea of a really basic Common commerce language surrounded constantly by all the other weird shit going on just by virtue of so many different cultures coexisting all the time. It would have just made the comic needlessly complicated, but seeing as I built an entire magic system around Word Power I'm still really into the idea of how it would work in KC.

The language that had developed over time in Somerset's province was unhurried and constant, like its people and its weather, and like every other aspect of her hometown Phineas had a conflicted relationship with it. Before Mana the long, lazy syllables had only been sluggish on her tongue, but after the star grew into her the smallness of the words and their preoccupation with the familiar became suffocating. For some early years she fought her accent, but with only Jo and Gideon to learn from her drawl was doomed to stay put. Her impressions of Jo, and her food and her fury and her cat, eventually sweetened her feelings towards her Somerset dialect. Before she left home she allowed it to gradually infect her Common; yet another of Jo's artifacts she could carry with her. 

Her mentors' speech puzzled and often enchanted those who heard it. Both spoke beautiful Common with an entirely implacable accent, and when asked where they were from never provided a clear answer. Gideon sometimes smiled and waved a hand, "east," he would say. On special nights, when they were feeling especially drunk or close, or both, Phineas could hear them speaking some melodic nonsense to each other in the dark. Once Mana became a constant companion, Jo's rare singing and muttered pet names in her mysterious language made Phineas, barefoot in the only home she'd ever known, feel indescribably homesick.

Ulrich's words were like gossamer over Phineas' ears even when he was admonishing her, were kept in neat bottles in neat rows and carefully considered before he spun them. In addition to his Common was his Deutsch, a language cultivated in a faraway green country covered in cold mountains that Phineas was unsure he'd actually seen before. He seemed very attached to it, had worked to keep it up even so far away from others to speak it with, and given his theatrical training it could be assumed his accent was also intentional. He was far past the point of fumbling for vocabulary in Common, but when he was feeling sentimental his words were murmured gently in the language he spoke as a child. Ulrich's Silver, his latest linguistic venture, gilded his speech in a mirror glaze even as unrefined as it was. Phineas loved when he spoke it, loved him, leaning into the effects of speech that made the speaker irresistible. If she could be affected, if it was working, it meant he was embracing this new facet of himself and that made him lovely.

Lucky Noon spoke everything, Phin thought, and she often wondered if language had come from stars in the first place. One-on-one, Noon spoke whatever their partner was most comfortable with, but their group announcements were in Common that, like Jo and Crow's speech, made Mana ache in Phineas' bones. Sometimes they spoke to Phineas, who demanded to be considered an equal to this deity, in the language they used with their siblings. Phineas' human tongue couldn't converse but she understood in the way she understood the concept of burning when she put her hand on a hot stove. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Noon sang to themself, a subliminal hum that worked through the wood of the ship and conjured dreams of alien geometry and an impossible, impossible expanse.

On restless nights the three of them huddled together in the engine room, the humans curled up in their blankets in the light of the ship's heart, sleepy voices blending together.


End file.
